I'm not going to be able to address everything tonight. I'll start as best I can.
(WhatHappened) The two of you have agreed on everything. Where does this leave TNGF?
The T in TNGF might not be theoretical forever. Or even for that long. Maybe. We'll see soon.
I think it's normal for humans to prepare for the last thing that happened. To a large extent the relationship boundaries that The Signal and I have formulated are in response to our last relationship with The Star. Even though it happened five years ago we are still affected by it greatly. Since that relationship is our only experience with poly it's informed what we know about what could happen in the future. It's perhaps wrong to think that these boundaries would prevent another poly relationship like that happening. But it's the language we know.
We're trying to figure out what our privacy rules are going to be like. I'm actually sitting next to The Signal as I write this--she is feeling more comfortable about me writing things and talking about poly. But she doesn't need to see what I write. Nor does she need to see what I write to other people--just the actions at this point, and perhaps a precis of what I'm doing. Now do those rights extend to a partner? I am not sure yet only in that I don't know what a future partner will want from me. I don't want to call TNGF a cipher. But until I know what that partner is like, I am not sure what she will want or be comfortable with.
I once wrote elsewhere that The Star was not a cardboard cutout to me. She had star-sized hopes and dreams, star-shaped views on the world and what she wanted from her life and mine. Just as it would have been wrong for me to reduce The Star to a generic list of rules and words before I'd even met her, I think it would be wrong to create attributes for a TNGF before I meet her. TNGF will not be The Star. (Thank God.) And until I know TNGF as well as I knew The Star, I don't know if I'll be comfortable in drawing up privacy boundaries--with The Signal, or with her. Or maybe with all three together.
(GirlFromTexlahoma)Having said that, your list of boundaries was like, the least restrictive list of initial boundaries I've ever seen.
In my line of work, when I make everybody slightly angry I am probably on the right track. I get a little nervous when one person is very happy because it probably means that someone else will be
really unhappy. (Sound familiar?)
So putting together boundaries that some people think are too restrictive, and other people think are too lenient, might be at about the right place. Then again as Reverie alluded to, these boundaries are designed to work for our relationship, for the two of us at this moment. They probably wouldn't work for anther two people at another time, place, poly status, poly experience, or mental state. They're subject to change and they will change. They might change really soon.
(icesong)Married poly women aren't immune to getting their hearts broken, either. Just sayin'.
Yeah. I am cognizant that I might hurt someone else. That does worry me. Even after The Star tore my heart out and stomped on it, I was afraid that I'd hurt her. (To that end, I am working on an essay about forgiveness and my difficulties with forgiveness, which I hope to post here over the weekend.) And I also realize that I, rightly, have to learn how to be a good secondary--I don't like that word but I'm not sure what better term to use--and a good metamour. (I don't think I have the temporal, spiritual, or mental bandwidth to be a co-primary.) The Star never thought of me as a secondary--though I didn't know that at the time--and I was a lousy metamour to The Silent, not that The Silent ever really tried to be one to me. I'm not saying that I hurt their marriage, because their marriage was on life support anyway and after I left The Star soon pulled its plug. I don't think I helped much though. I want to be a positive for someone else's relationships.
But I am learning from this place.
(Reverie)You can't write into a rule book that "[your love for each other will never end]." Love does what it wants and comes and goes as it pleases depending on how two people treat one another.
No, you are right in one way In a practical sense things can change. Maybe one day something will happen to us and we'll have to separate. Maybe one day The Signal will meet a lady and she'll decide to follow her heart away from me. Maybe I'll get an offer from TNGF I can't refuse. No, we can't write a rule book that will legislate that those things will never happen.
But at the same time I will never, ever stop loving The Signal. I loved her from the minute I first saw her and I have simply never stopped, for 12 years this April. Putting that down on paper is like writing that the sky is blue or that birds sing: it's true whether it's written down or not. If it came down to a choice between me being actively poly or me still loving The Signal, well, there is no choice for me. By her grace, The Signal will likely not force me to make that choice. My love for The Signal might turn off a future TNGF. But then I just will have to find another.
And so when we agreed that "our love for each other will never end" we agreed that, even if our time together comes to an end, our love won't. I'm not proud that I still carry a torch for The Star even after she was so awful to me. But, if I still feel that way for her after six months of relative torment, how much more will I still love The Signal after 12 lovely years?
(WhatHappened)Perhaps, then, you do poly better than my XBF who swore they had years of experience, did poly better than anyone they knew, and never had any drama.
Oh you! Actually I've already talked in this forum about how The Star had had a lot of experience in being poly and in fact before we met her we barely even knew what polyamory was. And despite that
and that my dating transcript was full of incompletes and fails and I shouldn't have been admitted to Relationship Grad School, somehow The Star acted like she was the novice and I seemed like the one who was handling it rather well.
Looking back on it, The Signal argues that, since The Star didn't really love her and vice versa, neither she nor The Star were really being poly in the relationship (OK The Star had The Silent too, but their relationship was dying and if The Star had had her way she would have left The Silent for me in a heartbeat). But I was. Realizing that went a long way towards me finally accepting that I was poly. I did love The Signal and The Star, my heart belonged to both of them, I joyfully wore The Signal's ring and The Star's necklace.
I'll still admit I was pretty damn clueless. So there's at least one ex-boyfriend who does.
(to be continued maybe tomorrow)